Jesus The Man, Jesus the Myth

Was there ever a man behind the myth of Yeshua ben Yosef?

To the Christians it is vitally important that people see Jesus as a historical figure. Jesus is the son of God and he was a man. That is the essence of their religion. Naturally anything that casts doubt upon the historicity of Jesus they will take as an attack on themselves, on their most cherished beliefs, so you can expect them to pull any stunt to prove that Jesus was real. But have they done enough to convince the open-minded sceptic?

I have had Christians debating this issue with me who proclaim that there is more evidence for the existence of Jesus than exists for anybody born before the twentieth century. That is ludicrous. But they believe it. More evidence of Jesus than Queen Victoria? I hardly think so.

There is not one single piece of archaeological, forensic or documentary evidence that shows Jesus was ever alive.

There is a huge gap at the heart of the Jesus story. There is not one single piece of archaeological, forensic or documentary evidence that shows Jesus was ever alive. There is plenty of evidence that people believed that there was a man named Jesus who was killed, but none that he was alive. By that I mean nothing exists from the time of the supposed life of Jesus. No letters exist that mention Jesus the preacher or miracle worker. No Christian letters or diaries, no Jewish ones, no Greek ones, no Roman ones. Nobody wrote about a single aspect of his life while he was living it. Just think for a moment about what the man was supposed to have done. He was supposed to have had meetings with thousands of people. He was supposed to have cured people, even raised a man from the dead. He was supposed to have entered the city of Jerusalem at the head of a triumphal procession and yet nobody wrote anything about it at the time. Not a book, not a diary, not a graffito, not even a sale or return catering order for loaves and fishes. Isn't that just a little hard to believe?

There is not a single physical description of Jesus, not one. Isn't that a little odd? Had the man got no distinguishing features at all?

Granted, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence and the idea that anything that is hard to believe isn't true is not exactly scientific but the lack of evidence is quite alarming. There are many gospels, many more than are accepted in the official church canon, but none of these are contemporary. All are written in the past tense: there was a man named Jesus who died and was returned to life, and this is his story. There are no rough drafts available from the time the authors didn't know the ending.

In addition to non-contemporary stories written by followers of Jesus, man or myth, there are some reports by non-Christians. These are pathetic evidence.

The best non-Christian source is Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian. He mentions James as the brother of Jesus (yes, James, the son of the eternal virgin Mary... ) and he appears to call him the brother of Jesus, known as the Christ. That phrase is suspected by some as being a forgery, but I see no reason to doubt it. Earlier in the work of Josephus there is clear evidence of Christian tampering. The Christian apologist scholar Origen, writing a century after the time of Josephus, states clearly that the Jew Josephus does not acknowledge Jesus as Messiah. And yet later, after the establishment of the official Roman church the Christian Eusebius produces the only extant copy of the work of Josephus and lo and behold it contains a clear reference to Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Of course it is faked. Clumsily. There is a lot of controversy over exactly how much of the passage is faked.

“At this time there was Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed (surprising / wonderful) works, and a teacher of people who received the (truth / unusual) with pleasure. He stirred up both many Jews and many Greeks. He was the Christ. And when Pilate condemned him to the cross, since he was accused by the leading men among us, those who had loved him from the first did not desist, for he appeared to them on the third day, having life again, as the prophets of God had foretold these and countless other marvellous things about him. And until now the tribe of Christians, so named from him, is not extinct.”

Now some of that passage is blatant forgery, totally out of character for Josephus, something a Jew with his beliefs simply would never think, let alone write. On the other hand some of it is more plausible. Remember that Origen was certain that Josephus had not acknowledged Jesus as Messiah, why would he have written that if he meant Josephus had not mentioned Jesus at all? There must have been some reference to Jesus, the big question remains just exactly how much was original Josephus and how much was written by Eusebius or other Christians looking to create pious forgeries to give greater witness to their saviour?

The following is what I believe to have been the core:

“At this time there was Jesus, a wise man. For he was one who performed (surprising / wonderful) works, and a teacher of people who received the (truth / unusual) with pleasure. He stirred up both many Jews and many Greeks. And when Pilate condemned him to the cross, since he was accused by the leading men among us, those who had loved him from the first did not desist. And until now the tribe of Christians, so named from him, is not extinct.”

Any websites that report the full Eusebian version of Josephus without mentioning the possibility of forgery should be shunned as totally unreliable, if there were not already enough clues to their bias.

Josephus was not born until after Jesus,
man or myth, was safely dead

Like all the rest of the non-Christian writers whose writings “prove” the historical existence of Jesus Josephus was not born until after Jesus, man or myth, was safely dead. It is impossible to consider Josephus as a contemporary witness, everything Josephus has relayed must be considered hearsay, it cannot be anything else as he could not have witnessed events before his own birth! Joseph ben Mattathias was born in 37 CE. He was from a privileged Jewish background, he travelled to Rome as a young man and was very impressed with its civilization, he was later forced into a Jewish rebellion against Rome and was captured, in his later life as a Roman citizen he took the name Flavius Josephus. Given his upbringing of orthodox Judaism and his adopted Roman political sympathies he is as likely to be proclaiming Jesus as the Jewish Messiah as Shakespeare would be calling the murderer of a king a working class hero. It is simply incredible for such a man to make such an identification, it goes against everything he believed in.

Because Josephus cannot be a contemporary witness it is not particularly relevant what he says about Jesus. Josephus was writing in Rome about the history of his Jewish people. He was relying on evidence from unnamed sources. There were several Christians around in Rome at the time, it is not inconceivable that Josephus had heard the tales about Jesus and mistook myth for fact. The story of Jesus the man is not that incredible, there was a man named Jesus who preached and stirred up Jews and Greeks and Romans with his preaching. It's not exactly a tale of a six headed dog biting Herod is it? Why should anybody doubt that there was such a man? Or that he was crucified? Or even that he was unjustly crucified? But the fact remains that there is no evidence that there was such a man except from accounts given by people who believed he was the Messiah or historical records that did not appear in any form until a generation after his supposed death. Why would Jews or Romans be bothered to argue about his existence? Whether Jesus was a man or not was never the issue, what mattered to the Jews and Romans who did not accept the new cult was whether he was the son of God, to disprove he was the son of God it was considered better to make the slightly more plausible suggestion that Jesus was just this guy.

Would you consider yourself a good and reliable witness to the historical events that happened before you were born? Of course not. Josephus cannot have known Jesus, he was born at least one year before the death of Jesus in 36 CE. Isn't the ambiguity of the death date of Jesus a little worrying too? The single most important date in the history of life on Earth if you are to believe the hype and they are not even particularly clear about when it was!

Nothing of Christian history was written down in any language, everything was as fluid as the accounts of a football match in a pub. It would not have taken an effort to create a myth around Jesus, it would have taken an effort to prevent it. The earliest Christian writings that have survived are not gospels, they are the work of Saul of Tarsus, who did not become a Christian until after he caused the martyrdom of Stephen and the destruction of the world's first (and at the time only) Christian church, in Jerusalem, in 37 CE. A little later Saul claims he sees a vision of Jesus (who was crucified at least one year before, if he lived at all) and he goes on to become Saint Paul, the leading Christian, and the first author of a Christian work. Isn't that just a little odd? The number one Christian is a man who never met the man and yet the stories say that THOUSANDS of people met and followed Jesus and he had a dozen close disciples. It is difficult to believe that the “true disciples” of Jesus would not have felt they outranked this Johnny-come-lately.

An alternative hypothesis is that there never was a Jesus, he was a mythical figure around which fashionable mythic ideas could be draped. There had to be a Jewish Messiah at some time, it was anticipated in the Scriptures. What would be the name of this Messiah? Naturally he would be The New Joshua, sent by God to free the nation of Israel. For some strange reason Christians always translate Yeshua as Joshua in the Old Testament and in the New Testament it is translated as Jesus. The Galileans of the time used old Hebrew names for their children but spoke Aramaic. The name Yeshua or YAHSHUA means God is Salvation. What other name could the Messiah have?

I find it hard to imagine an imaginary Messiah doing anything else other than that which is ascribed to Jesus. Jesus did nothing that a literate Greek educated Jew could not have scripted. Nothing he is reported to have said or done is out of character for a man following the script laid down by a Hellenized Jew wanting to create a mystery god-man cult. He showed no extraordinary insights about the future, he does not prophesy anything that came to pass, such as, well, for example you might expect him to predict that his enormous number of believers would be gentiles rather than Jews for a start!

Was Jesus a man or a myth? I don't know. I am unconvinced by both arguments. I find the constant Christian assertions that Jesus is as well attested to as any figure in history to be laughable. Nothing was recorded about Jesus the man until he was no longer a man, if he ever had been.

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